DEVAS, CHARLES STANTON. — English economist of the Christian social school, b. at Woodside (Old Windsor) on 26 August 1848, d. in London on 6 November 1906. In 1876 he published a pamphlet entitled Labour and Capital in England from the Catholic point of view (London), and in 1892 his principal work, Political Economy (ibid.).
Already in his first pamphlet he reveals the characteristics that distinguish his work as a scholar and publicist, and as a contributor to the Dublin Review: a pronounced reaction against the unnatural separation of economic science from morality; the application of Catholic morality to political and economic questions; and concern about the dangers of State socialism in opposition to the bold conclusions of the bishop of Nottingham, Edward G. Bagshawe, who, in several famous pastoral letters and in speeches at Catholic congresses, had not only accepted the theories of Cardinal Manning but had gone even further, formulating a genuine programme of State socialism. In the dispute between protectionists and free traders, he favoured moderate State intervention, expressing his views particularly clearly in the introduction to the new edition of J. B. Byles’s Sophisms of Free-Trade (London 1903).